The day before yesterday I had more than four times my per-day average of pageviews. Yesterday I went over by a factor of almost seven. I just have the standard D-land stats counter so I can�t match up server info with intradiary activity. Does anyone have anything you want to tell me?

I�m not sure I like the person I am when I post a P.S. like I did yesterday. The main reason I resist a blog is the way that both structurally and socially blogs encourage their keeper � but what keeps whom? � always to be in blog mode, like if you have an insight or a catty observation in the middle of the night, once you have signed onto being a blogger you are obliged to get up, power on the PC, and record it. (Also I resist because I think the constant self-analysis, Hmm, should I put this in my blog? Does this count as an insight? would drive me out of my tender gourd.) I like the diary format because I do my brain dump and I am done with it, and then I go about my business and I am not a keeper, I am not kept until the next time I open a blank Word doc and start typing. (Also the interactivity. The blog foregrounds the audience, presupposes one. Here I have more leeway and I can play to the crowd or play by myself; if I get vague or self-referential or self-congratulatory, I have violated no contract.) To PS is to push the envelope too because it implies that there are people out there, Dear Readers, who are hanging on my life�s every narrative development, and even if that were true, I don�t think it would be good for me and the larger diary project to curtsey in their direction, and also I would not want to thank and reward those hypothetical people, I would rather ask them to remove their eyeballs from the screen and get a life for god�s sake, go get some sunshine or a margarita or something.

Nils says, "Hesitating to write something is like the divining rod of journaling. When you feel the tremble, go there." I agree more with the first part than the second part, since one contract I do have pertains to the kind of going there that is or could be construed as trespassing. Sometimes I want to go there but I don�t because where I want to go is into what is someone else�s story, and that ownership (stewardship?) must be honored, even if he or she never tells it. My own divining rod is narrower and, I guess, twitchier � it is something like "hesitating to write something because you are afraid that it will make you look stupid or pathetic or foolish either in writing it or in retrospect." The tremble remains the same, however. And sometimes a P.S., breaking as it does through the back-to-business, is evidence of a tremble like a seismograph is evidence of an earthquake, and in the same way it has become part of the record, and in that case I should be grateful to the diary for how it demonstrated this to me. What I am trembling about and have been reticent about copping to because I am afraid it will make me look stupid or pathetic or foolish either in writing it or in retrospect is, obviously, the job thing. I say "obviously" but I�m a coward if I don�t spell this out to myself � that�s another contract.

First of all, I figured out yesterday that my dad�s visit has been a bugbear to me for reasons outside what it is. Because I do not plan to fill him in about my imminent cohabitation plans and because he will be staying at the Beacon Hill house, I haven�t been able to start in on the packing and the gradual moving. He knows that my lease isn�t up until the end of August, and he does not know me as someone who takes down the bookshelves until the last possible moment, and he�d rightly think it was peculiar if I�d given away my sofa and my bed. Or maybe this hesitation, the books part if not the furniture part, is more rooted in psychology, psychology comma mine, than in reality, but in any case it is there: to me my dad�s visit has become the thing after which I can start feeling like I�m moving out of the house and into the apartment and therefore before which I�m stuck, a lame duck, spinning my wheels, in a kind of stasis that feels like being bottled up. So any other stressor is going to be happening on top of that, and I have to assume that it�s going to get to me more than it would have as a single bullet.

I flipped out when I got the call yesterday about the second interview, I flipped out at the "very very close." Two "very"s!, I wrote to Vanessa in what in person would have been a wail. The combination of what other people had been telling me about my chances of nailing it and my own arrogance-but-was-it-really-arrogance-because-I-swear-I�m-not-making-things-up-about-the-drawing-of-the-lines had worked some voodoo on me so that the double very was incomprehensible to me, and I came crashing back down from the tantalizing sense of possibility upon which I had been floating since Monday morning, and as you may know, when I crash I crash all the way. Tears in the eyes, fatalistic declarations, reconfiguring the sense of possibility into hope�s suicide note, etc. The truth is that I�ve never had to go back for a second interview. I�ve gone in and nailed the first and people murmur and nod and say things about how it would be pointless to waste time, and hey presto, there I am signing something and getting a parking badge. I�ve been lucky, and this kind of suspense-cum-implied-dogfight is something with which I have no experience. I got the call and I did my flipping out and I sent out wail mail to a select few of my homeys and of course they wrote back with much encouragement, and then I took some deep breaths and I said to myself: OK, your assignment is to be ready not to get the job � that�s all. I had thought, after the Monday interview, that I�d done this already, but the crash had shown that I was incorrect. I�d gotten my hopes up. Sometimes lately I have been surprised and happy to catch myself doing that, proud of my resilience and of something good that seems unkillable in me, but on the other hand it is not what I want to be cultivating as the default. Hopes down the fact is that even though I�ve got all the lines drawn and the IT guy on my side, there are any number of factors that could scuttle my very-veriness. For instance, it�s a city agency so if an ethnic minority or sexual minority is applying and the hiring department feels underrepresented in that demographic, chances are they�ll go with that person instead of me. Or a Vietnam veteran or something � I say these things not out of resentment but because they are true. And the more I think about it the more I anxious I am about the one panelist�s comment regarding my youthful appearance. It�s a job with a lot of grown-up responsibilities for city data and city property, and I am a person who frequently gets, well, carded. Sometimes the bouncers, in handing my ID back to me, make similar comments. If both of the other candidates are or look substantially older than I do and the hiring department, even unconsciously, associates age with maturity, then I�m probably dead in the water. Was I too exuberant, too quick to banter, did I come off as insufficiently respectful of the gravity of an interview? Things like that. And things like that I cannot change, and I have to be ready to accept their consequences and move on, whatever that means. On the drive home last night I thought long and hard � like, yes, rubbing my face in it � about what it would be like not getting the job and having to deal with Gastro for another few months, having to give up my privacy and swank window office for Dr. Whipped and then having administratively to hold his hand because whoa does that dude need hand-holding as he settled in here, having to keep tapping into my dwindling slush fund and therefore having much less when the time came to go condo-shopping, having to keep temping maybe into the winter and to keep applying for jobs as I did, which is to keep having to be vulnerable and say I Want This and to keep making myself a figure of stupidity pathos and foolishness as I keep getting shot down. Traffic was bad and I was listening to the Black Keys. I kept an eye on the temperature gauge, vigilant, and I rubbed my face in it harder as if wanting it to leave a mark, not exactly like punishment but like if self-exasperation could � and maybe should � leave a scar. Would all of that be so bad, would it kill you? I asked, I demanded. No it would not. I made another resolution, this one to keep up the pressure at least intermittently until Friday afternoon. I stopped at the AM-PM and a guy in an Isuzu beckoned me towards him while making lewd faces and it was somehow reassuring, this kind of absurdity was cross-platform and would continue to manifest in my life whether I got the job or I didn�t. My life seemed to have inherent continuity and inherent integrity, and I found this gratifying, I found it and I took it. This is what it means to have an assignment, this is what you have to do. Then I went home and checked my e-mail, and in the course of deleting some old junk I discovered something from last month that had escaped my attention, and it was from an HR type who�d found my resume at monster and wanted me to get in touch about setting up a phone screen for a job that also didn�t have any of those distasteful words in its title, and although I had to kick my ass for having missed it � this happens sometimes because I�m home so seldom and the web client is buggy � it was also gratifying to see the data point: since I made the decision to quit Gastro in August, this made approximately one job listing per month that I think I�d be good at and happy doing and that someone else is willing to consider me for. Gratifying again to feel myself not entertaining the option of reneging on the Gastro promise and sticking it out because after all it is a job and any job is better than no job; at one listing per month, I could anticipate not having to temp through the whole winter, of having landed somewhere comfortable by maybe late February. I also have to keep reminding myself that Steve and my sister and my friends, and also presumably the hypothetical Dear Readers, do not consider me stupid and foolish and pathetic, and that it would take a lot more than my not getting a city job and then slogging through many months of principled temping to make them change their minds. (Hell if I know why, but helps if I also keep reminding myself that my rent and heating/electric bills will soon be going way, way down.) My attributes are incontrovertible. Yes to this too. Then I went for a short run, a mostly zippy four-ish miles that on empty stomach (v. bad) and with tetchy knee and Sunday-hike-depleted quads I willed into existence as the thing from which I would take more of what I needed, and, believe me, I took most of it. I say "mostly" because about a mile and a half into it I got a deep-impact stitch in my side but I gutted it out, I kept going, and then I was in the comfortable place of running as metaphor, and because I was so spacey it was the "like" in the metaphor as well; I imagined what it would be like to have a consoling hand on my back, that gentle weight that anchors you, and at the same time if the hand were pushing me, making me keep going. And if the hand on my back was my own. I said in response to the hand and the road and my achy legs, Yes, I am ready not to get this job, and to the extent that I can be objective about such a thing, I believe that I was not lying.

Then I got to Gastro this morning and I was continuing the exchange with Mrs. Roboto that we started yesterday after I got the call, relating the new mental developments, and she wrote, That's a lousy assignment. I understand the whole "If you expect the worst than everything else is a pleasant surprise" mentality and yet I think you can feel more confident in yourself than that. You walked into this last interview with the attitude that this job was yours � Did I? � and it got you through to round two. I'd say walk into round two with the same self-assuredness and this gig is yours.

So now I don�t know what to think. I wish I could pretend that it didn�t matter to me and that if I don�t get the job I�ll be able to shrug it off and say Damn that sucks, oh well and who wants to go to Linda�s. I wish I could act like I won�t take it personally. But I can�t, and like I made myself go all the way to the end with Todd, not pretending, and because the way to embody the antithesis of everything he said I was � that is, to continue to be true to myself, no pussing out and no snark � is to keep on not pretending, I have a contract and an obligation to tell the truth here, and I can�t fake the funk. I want this job very much, I think we are perfect for each other to the extent that I�m jealous of the other two candidates for getting to mess around with what I feel I should be my steady, and I will be sad and cry if I am jilted. That�s the end and that�s the truth, and if after the fact I feel stupid and foolish and pathetic and I don�t want to talk about it, I will have already have done what is required of me, I will have done it here.